For many women, Mother’s Day is a holiday tinged with grief. For those who have miscarried or who have struggled with infertility, the holiday is a reminder of the children they long for.

So says Clifton Park freelance artist and illustrator Jen Wojtowicz, who has written an 18-page, very personal comic book on baby loss, called “Protection” (III Demeanor Comics, 2014).

In it she writes: “Each loss leaves a hole. I have a nineteen year old. I should have a seventeen year old. I have a six year old. I should have a three year old. I should be four months pregnant. This time next year I should have a seven month old baby.”

She continues, “It’s the math of loss, for mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers. The numbers will never come out right as long as we live.”

Wojtowicz (whose name is pronounced wo-TO-vich), has two living children and has had three baby losses. Now, in addition to writing and illustrating books, she honors other grieving parents and their babies by making heirloom-style burial layettes and quilts that will provide the dignity and warmth of clothing.

Her son, Marcel, from a previous marriage, is 20. Two years after his birth, she suffered a miscarriage very early on, so early that, she says, “If I hadn’t have been paying close attention — because I wanted another child — I wouldn’t even have known I was pregnant.”

After a divorce and many years on her own thinking that she would rather be happy alone than unhappy with someone else, she got married again, to fellow artist and illustrator Marcus Kwame Anderson.

Wojtowicz and Anderson had a child together in 2008, JennyAdama, who is now 6 ½.

Later, they went on to have two baby losses: AdiaRose in 2011, who died soon after being born at 32 weeks’ gestation, and, a miscarriage in 2014 that occurred at about eight weeks.

AdiaRose was delivered by emergency Cesarean section when doctors realized she was not moving as she should. She had had a heartbeat until just before she was born, but was born without one. “They got her heart going,” Wojtowicz said, but they could not keep the baby oxygenated or keep her heart beating on its own.

The doctors said that the baby had hydrops. The parents could either have her whisked off to the neonatal intensive care unit, which probably would not help and where they would not be allowed to touch her at all, or they could hold her close for her few moments of life.

They decided to hold her, and “she passed very peacefully,” Wojtowicz said.

One thing that really helped the couple soon after AdiaRose’s birth and death was having nurses at Albany Medical Center who “knew exactly what to do,” Wojtowicz said. They took a number of photos and printed them out and also gave them to the couple on a memory card so that they could use them as they liked later. They printed out special poems and pasted them onto scrapbook paper. They made a Certificate of Life for the baby.

The nurses said that they had a dress for her. They brought out a “beautiful blue eyelet dress” and a “little hand-knitted hat that fit her perfectly,” Wojtowicz remembered. Wojtowicz realized that nothing she had bought for a newborn would have fit AdiaRose. She asked where the dress came from, and the nurses told her that they had ladies who make these things.

“The fact that really stuck with me was that someone who didn’t know us was thinking about us before we even needed them,” she said. “And everything was ready.”

For a couple of months after AdiaRose’s birth and death, Wojtowicz felt guilt that what had happened was her fault, and had stemmed from something that she had done or had not done.

Then they learned that AdiaRose had had trisomy 13, an extra 13th chromosome, in “100 percent of her cells.” The doctors told them that this condition was “incompatible with life,” and that in fact they would never have expected the baby to move and develop as well and for as long as she had.

The baby was “very well nourished,” they told her. All of this helped to lift her “terrible cloud of doubt,” showing her that it was not her fault, but just the way that this baby was made, she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if they had not been able to tell me conclusively, ‘This is what happened.’”

For Wojtowicz, all of her children are cause for joy rather than regret. It helps, for her, to try to include them in the ongoing life of her family, in a way that brings comfort.

She calls herself spiritual but not religious. She relies strongly on her own customized rituals and beliefs adopted from faith traditions from around the world that especially resonate with her.  

“I personally believe that souls live forever,” Wojtowicz says. “I kind of take what I like and leave the rest. I feel that God put wisdom all over the Earth, and that you know those truths when you hear them. They usually are about love and peace and understanding, as opposed to shunning and excluding and guilt.”

She and Anderson joined a support group at St. Peter’s Hospital for parents who had experienced fetal or newborn infant loss. At one point, the nurse who led that group confirmed that St. Peter’s also relies on donations from the community for all of those kinds of items. “And so I started designing and making things,” Wojtowicz said, which involved teaching herself to sew.

“I wanted to make sure that even very very tiny babies were appropriately dressed and honored. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that their loss was termed ‘only a miscarriage’ when, to them, no matter how big or small, the loss of your child is the loss of your child. That’s a person that you were supposed to know. That’s a promise that you feel that you have, and then it’s gone,” she said.

Many people struggle with fertility, she said, and try for years to carry a pregnancy to term. Any loss, she said, is heartbreaking.

According to the National Vital Statistics System of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, fetal mortality is a major but often overlooked public-health issue. There are more than 1 million fetal losses per year in the United States, with the vast majority occurring before 20 weeks of gestation.

Asked if she plans to try again, Wojtowicz said that she is 46 now, and that she “cannot afford to have any unhappy days that I don’t need to have.” She needs to be happy, she said, for her daughter, her husband, and herself. “Trying and trying and trying,” she said, would be too stressful.

Wojtowicz also makes memory boxes for parents. “They can be made out of anything,” she said. “We usually get them in pasteboard, and then we can paint them and decorate them.”

She has designed Certificates of Life and taken some of the poems that she was given and designed poem cards and footprint cards. She makes all of these available for free on her website, www.jennysdresserdrawer.com, so that any individual, hospital, or organization with a need can download and print them. 

She also sells some of these items through her site at a nominal cost. “But if people can’t afford them, we provide them for free,” she said. The idea behind asking for a little money, she said, is “so that I can buy supplies to make the layettes; that does help a lot.”

When making burial layettes, she tries to achieve an heirloom look and feel. She designs and sews dresses for babies of all sizes, including those as small as the palm of a hand.

She prefers cottons and linens for the most part, and uses “some silk.” She buys vintage fabrics including cashmere — “anything beautiful” — and cleans them before beginning to repurpose them. She also collects vintage embroidery and handkerchiefs.

She needs to custom-order her hand-tatted silk lace, because “the scale has to be correct. You can’t have a tiny three- or four-inch gown with a big huge lace on it.”

Wojtowicz likes to incorporate vintage handwork, such as the embroidered edge of a pillowcase or a length of crocheted lace, because “I feel like these babies are being given something to take with them that was from here, that was made with love. Something that was heirloom, even though they only got to be here very briefly.”

She also makes tiny hats, blankets, and quilts. For the hats, some of which, she says, “would fit on the end of your thumb or your finger,” she buys knit fabric with very fine ribbing, sews a tube the right width, doubles it over, stitches the top, and adds trimmings.

Many items are intended as keepsakes, particularly if a loss occurred early on. “I wanted to have something for the tiniest of babies that either their parents could keep or they could be wrapped in,” she said.

The smallest dress she makes is just a few inches long: “mostly too small for anyone to be dressed in, but it’s something the parents can have that reflects the actual size of their child.”

She buys furoshiki from Japan — special decorative square cloths used for wrapping special gifts — and turns them into what she calls “furoshiki quilts,” to symbolize that the lost child is “a special gift.” In the furoshiki quilts, she uses a backing of white flannel, since this is “better for photographing the baby.”

Kimberly Denton, an RNC, or registered nurse, certified, at St. Peter’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, has passed along many of Wojtowicz’s creations to families. “I don’t think they even really think about where they come from at the time,” she said. “But it just makes them feel that their child is very special. I mean, to them the child’s special, but to know that someone else thinks the child is special too; there’s no way to describe the meaning to the families.”

Wojtowicz said that health professionals who work with these families are “kind of at ground zero.” What they say and do, she said, “can really determine a lot of how a person’s grief and depression go afterwards.”

At both Albany Medical Center, in their experience with AdiaRose, and at St. Peter’s, where they attend the support group run by nurses including Denton, they have been very fortunate, she said. The nurses at both hospitals “care an awful lot about their patients and go above and beyond.”

Friends or acquaintances, she said, sometimes make the mistake of thinking that parents won’t want to talk about their experience, that they shouldn’t remind them of the darkest day in their lives. “For my husband and me, we’re always thinking about it. We’re always, always thinking about it.” She and Anderson are, she said, “profoundly grateful for the people in our lives who will just say her name and bring her up.”

It’s OK, she said, to let mothers who have lost children know, on Mother’s Day, that “we think of you and your motherhood, no matter how brief it may have been.”

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The parents’ support group at St. Peter’s Hospital, CARES Perinatal Bereavement Pregnancy and Infant Loss Support, meets first Thursday every other month at 7:30 p.m. For more information, call 525-1602.